Total Mileage: 252.6
After the cow-crap-covered pack incident and finishing out the week just south of Lima, I needed to push hard to make it to the Island Park post office on Wednesday before it closed at 4.
So I did a 41.4 to Taylor Mountain and did 25.6 by 3:45 to arrive at the post office which had my 9th pair of shoes. Took an hour to charge my stuff, ate a Cali chimichanga and kept going.
The next day I arrived in Yellowstone and hiked with 2 traveling nurses, “Moon Fall” and “Bodega.” We hiked and talked all the way to Old Faithful Village. Great humans!
From there I went another 10 miles and cowboy camped on the beach at Shoshone Lake. The next day I met “Hong Kong”, a great kid from San Fran rocking an External Frame Pack. Haven’t seen those since the 70’s, lol. We spent the next couple days hiking together. Awesome dude and we hiked to the pass and hitched into Dubois. He picked up the lunch tab and I decided to not shower or laundry and just resupply my food and get back on the trail.
At the grocery store I ran into “Chuckles” and “Frisky” a couple from back home I was hoping to see on the trail. I decided to hike out with them and take a leisurely afternoon. I Camped with them and got to bed before 10pm, which I hadn’t done in a while. I said my goodbyes and left for the trail at 4:45 am.
Everything was going relatively smooth until about 2pm when the dark clouds rolled in while I was going through a wide open meadow. Thunder, lightning and hail lingered right over the top of me and it took 40 minutes to get to the treeline and pitch my tent. I had been running to get out of it and once I got inside my tent, freezing and soaked, I passed out for 2 hours. When I woke up it was drizzling so I packed up and hiked another 3 hours before calling it a day.
What a week!
